In a statement, Juniper’s leadership team said that while they believe the installation process is becoming easier for the network provider’s newest customers, thanks to maturing hybrid cloud and NFV solutions leading to a more standardized market, what they called “day-two and onward” services still present a significant growth opportunity they expect the acquisition will support.

“Day-two and the ongoing experience operating this complex software stack is where we see an opportunity,” Ankur Singla, Juniper’s vice president of SDN and orchestration systems, wrote in a Dec. 1 blog post. “In order to help solve this challenge for our customers, we have taken an important step through our intent to acquire AppFormix.”

With Juniper running into roadblocks when it came to the adoption and growth of its large-scale hybrid cloud, SaaS and network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments with telecom service providers, Singla wrote, the need for a stronger cloud operations management solution became apparent.

“AppFormix brings industry-leading streaming analytics and machine learning solutions to Juniper that are tailored for managing operations of large OpenStack and Kubernetes-based Hybrid cloud and NFV/Telco clouds,” he wrote.

Combined with Juniper’s Contrail product line, AppFormix will improve cloud orchestration, security, accounting, and planning, and will answer the need for self-driving infrastructure seen in the industry.

AppFormix has also integrated with OpenContrail to reduce the number of challenges involved with operating large scale software-defined networks and networking services. Ultimately, Singla wrote, the acquisition allows Juniper to offer a single solution that does not require any customization or plug-in development.

Juniper’s acquisition of AppFormix is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2016.

NetApp has revealed updates to its hybrid cloud offerings that include new data fabric solutions and services that improve secure movement of data in addition to other service upgrades. With these new services to